Richard Cohen is what passes for an opinion editorialist in the Washington Post — not a learned one, just a bloviating one. Cohen’s latest, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” is at the same time as self-loathing as it is historically stupid. Not only does this nonsense Cohen ladled out upon us all serve an example that you don’t have to actually know anything to be in our modern Old Media establishment, but it is evidence that the profession of editor is long dead.

In his ten paragraphs Cohen indulges every left-wing trope that one can find. Whites are all racist, we don’t do enough for “the poor” in America, Christianity is the root of all evil, and it all started in the 1850s when the Republican Party was born. Most ridiculously, Cohen a-historically seems to think that the art of compromise died in American politics when the GOP was born. This last bit alone is guffaw worthy to say the least.

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In an April 29, 2011 item by Scott Jaschik, Inside High Ed published this false statement provided by University of Missouri professor Judy Ancel:

Ancel, the other instructor, said in an interview that she works on annual contracts and that the university has not taken any action against her. She also released a statement in which she explained the context behind some of the quotes shown in the video.

For example, she noted that one of her quotes in the Breitbart video is: “violence is a tactic and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.” Here is what she said really happened: “After students had watched a film on the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King, they were discussing nonviolence. I said, ‘One guy in the film … said ‘violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.’ ” In this instance, she said, “Breitbart’s editing has literally put words in my mouth that were not mine, and they never were mine.”

That is demonstrably false and misleading and was addressed in a subsequent post at Big Government by Insurgent Visuals after an additional careful review of the film in question.

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Why the left-wing blogs are wrong.

Several serious allegations are being leveled at Andrew Breitbart. Amusingly, these complaints are even taking shape as a verb: to be “Breitbarted” is to be maligned unfairly with “selectively-edited” video that is taken out of context. The left is so busy spinning memes to distract from Breitbart’s repeated and consistent revelations about institutions of the left that they retreat into messaging and marketing.

The union videos involving Judy Ancel and Don Giljum, teaching a course on labor studies at the University of Missouri Kansas City, are being aggressively rebutted by the bloggers who form the backbone of the mainstream media’s dying artifice, in order to quickly malign this story and suck out its life.

The defense of Judy Ancel relies on saying her comments are out of context. She radicalized her classes with repeated citations of violence and encouraged Don Giljum when he did the same. Judy's a radical union organizer.

If they can focus on trivialities, if they can avoid focusing on the core issues at stake, they can win through both attrition and distraction. Relying on a divided and much less aggressive conservative blogosphere, and less coordinated, they pick off their media targets with ease.

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“Texas Budget Could Cost 600,000 Jobs.”

Wow! Red Alert! Red Alert! If you pull up CNN you will be treated to this sky-is-falling bullet point headline of doom regarding the $83.8 billion budget that will go before the Lone Star State’s legislature next week. The article goes on to describe the spending cuts in the budget as “harsh” and bases this decidedly partial adjective on the estimates released by the bi-partisan Legislative Budget Board. Finally, it deems the projected “loss” of 263,500 private sector jobs and 343,000 government positions by 2013 as counter to the pro-jobs platform of Republican governor Rick Perry.

Naturally, liberal Democrats who never met a government program they didn’t deem absolutely essential (or under-funded) pounced on this story. “The voters did not elect us to eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Mike Villarreal (D). “We can’t grow the Texas economy with a budget that destroys jobs, hurts neighborhood schools and makes college more expensive,” he howled, once again personifying tea partier frustration over politicians who are more about scoring political points to protect their power and positions than taking an honest approach to governing and finding solutions to the problems that plague this nation.

I say this because, well, let me ask you, dear readers–who by virtue of your being on this site demonstrate a higher IQ than most–a common sense question.  If you were a governor trying to make a name for yourself on the national stage by using your own state as a jobs-creation model would you seriously propose a budget that kills over a half million jobs in two years? Of course not.  In fact, I’ve met governor Perry and trust me, this is a sharp man who understands economics.

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Newsweek has published another one of those aren’t-Americans-Stupid articles wherein we find that few Americans know anything about either our history or our political system. People have no idea who our current vice president is, they don’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and they haven’t a clue who takes the office of president if the prez and the VP are incapacitated. But what is more interesting in Newsweek’s article is the reason the news magazine thinks that we are so stupid. Absurdly Newsweek thinks it’s because government doesn’t spend enough money on education.

First of all, I have to agree that Americans are as ignorant as can be on our history and our system of government. You can see it just about everywhere. In fact, you can see it in voting patterns. Illinois is a perfect example. The corruption has been endemic in the Democrat Party in Illinois for decades, yet voters repeatedly pull that donkey lever. It is clear they are ignorant of why things are so bad in the Land of Lincoln and they send the same crooks back to the state house over and over again.

Certainly it is impossible to dispute Newsweek’s central claim that Americans display an appallingly high level of civic ignorance. But Newsweek doesn’t just report its findings, it goes on to opine on just why we as a nation are so ignorant of our civics and history.

Newsweek thinks it’s because we don’t spend enough money on education: (my bold)

It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.

Newsweek’s claim here is as appallingly ignorant of the facts as someone who doesn’t know that the law of the land is the Constitution of the United States!

Even the left-wing New York Times realizes that the U.S. spends more on education that almost every other nation on earth. For instance, recently the Times published a piece that contained the following:

In an interview, Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.

Spending isn’t the problem. The problem is that Democrats and left-wingers have taken over our education and devastated its effectiveness. The left has dumbed down our education from the lowest grades to the halls of our institutes of higher learning until what passes for education is merely a joke.

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Late last week, using the hard work of others documenting the shameful behavior of pro-union activists in Wisconsin, I gathered an exhaustive list that closes the case for anyone doubting that an intense campaign of intimidation, violence, and harassment is taking place against anyone who dares disagree with Big Labor. Businesses have been threatened with boycotts, legislators have received death threats, vandalism is appearing — and as I mentioned in my article, chances were better than not that I missed some incidents. Well, it turns out that I did. Over at  National Review Online, Deroy Murdock came up with his own list of death threats aimed at pro-Walker supporters that includes a bomb threat and a vile, homophobic email sent to a capitol staffer.

This campaign — coordinated or not — is beyond anything I’ve seen in this country in my lifetime, and it’s only getting worse. And yet, the very same mainstream media that found a week’s worth of stories regarding a crosshairs map the Tucson shooter never saw, the same mainstream media that waged a relentless and dishonest campaign against the Tea Party — refuses to give what’s happening in Wisconsin at the hands of bullying Leftists the kind of attention it demands. This isn’t even about the media playing fair (a waste of breath), this is about calling for civility before someone gets hurt.

Other than some smaller, alt-weekly publications, the only newspaper in Milwaukee is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It’s a daily publication that’s read throughout the state and when I lived in Milwaukee it was breathtakingly biased, going so far as to move its editorials in favor of gun control to the front page on the same day important gun control votes were taking place. Obviously the paper has only gotten worse over the past two decades, and its editors even more belligerent and arrogant.

Posting at Charlie Sykes’ WTMJ blog, George Mitchell tells the incredible story of his back and forth with Journal-Sentinel managing editor George Stanley:

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Alternate headline: “Paul Krugman Will Not Read This Article”

Second alternate headline: “Paul Krugman: Lolcats > Conservatives”

Over the weekend a prominent figure in the art world, a liberal, came up to a group of us from Team Breitbart following a conversation that took place both on air and off, and told us we, particularly Big Journalism EIC Dana Loesch, are very respectable spokespeople for our side.  Needless to say, we were flattered, but while I certainly didn’t attempt to sway him off of his position that we’re super cool, I would contend we are merely representative of the quality people in our movement, as opposed to exceptions to the rule that conservatives are racist, bigoted, intolerant, etc.  Clearly the sweet accolade from the sweet man had a very powerful and illustrative subtext to it: he just doesn’t know many conservatives… if any.

One of the reasons for the existence of this very blog is because many of us contend that a substantial portion of the movers and shakers on the left, like the aforementioned gentleman, tend to live in bubbles.  This is a common theme across several of the Bigs.  Hollywood, the mainstream media, and academia, to name a few high profile arenas, are so overwhelming left-of center that it’s rare to find Republicans inhabiting them at all, much less outspoken Tea Partiers like the ones who make up the Bigs team.  On the other hand, those of us on the right are constantly forced to contend with the best thought the left has to offer, or else we’d be forgoing academics in one of the world’s most educated societies, we’d be abstaining from entertainment in the country that redefined it, and as good as the fantasy of doing away with what we call “the mainstream media” sounds, that’s a process that would take decades to complete, if it’s even possible (or beneficial).

So we’re forced to listen, whether we want to or not.  The schools, entertainers, and media outlets have us as a captive audience while these movers and shakers can comfortably build a career in the world of ideas without as much as consulting with those held by (at least) half of us.

Case in point, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton Economics Professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.  Last week, Krugman was asked which websites he reads frequently, and after providing a list of liberals and leftists like Greg Sargent, Josh Marshall, Digby, and Atrios, he copped to not reading any conservatives online on a regular basis: (more…)

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has ranked Yale University as among the worst violators of free speech on U.S. campuses.

Alum Michael Rubin, writing at Commentary, provides examples:

In 2009, Yale College Dean Mary Miller censored the Freshman Class Council’s traditional t-shirt before the Yale-Harvard game because it sported an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote containing the oh-so-incendiary word – sissies.”

Yale also garnered international headlines when a chief administrator pressured the allegedly autonomous Yale University Press to censor a scholarly view of the Danish cartoon controversy. And, oh, the intervention happened to coincide with Yale President Richard Levin’s courting of Persian Gulf donors.

Also, when Levin was on the trail of Chinese money, he restricted protests outside the campus venue in which Chinese President Hu Jintao, the university’s guest of honor, would hold forth.

Such trampling of free speech is par for the course on campuses throughout the nation. But what magnifies the usual hypocrisy and arrogance in Yale’s case is the high-level responsibility of journalists in rubber-stamping the transgressions.

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On the heels of news that the government is engaging in some sketchy social media networking. (Related: ABC’s “Obama Media Machine: State Run Media 2.0?)

From 24thstate:

On my Facebook page, a well-meaning connection dropped this little nugget into his comment stream.

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:

South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th

Wisconsin is currently ranked 2nd. Welcome to the race to the bottom.

It’s an interesting piece, because it’s all over the internet in a Google Search.  There is no citation for the piece, and the comments are left mostly by anonymous users at hundreds of news sites and comment sections covering the union strike in Wisconsin.

This is astroturf at its finest.  A low-paid intern or first year employee cutting and pasting a talking point into comment sections as they register, too lazy to change it up, and too rushed to bother creating real profiles to post from.

The tipoff for me was the use of educators.  The use of the word “educators” instead of teachers is a code word meant to make you think of the word educate, which is so much sexier than teaching.

The problem is the “statistic,” no matter where it came from, is bunk.  Focusing on the students who took the ACT/SAT doesn’t cover the whole educational picture.  It covers those most likely to graduate across a state (knowing full well that school districts within a state, and even a city, vary wildly).  It doesn’t touch on dropout rates at all.

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From a CNN segment called “Labor’s Last Stand?”:

Money quote at the end:

And Democrats say there is another reason Republicans want to gut unions. Organized labor donates hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates like Barack Obama. So if you weaken the unions, you weaken a traditional moneyed supporter of the Democratic Party.

And what do Republicans say, Ms. Costello?  You just gave the Democrats’ explanation for why Republicans across the country are rallying to the side of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s union busting plan, so what would the Republicans say is inspiring their massive grassroots effort?  Hello?  Hello?  Is this thing on?

Oh, the segment’s already over.

If you get around to airing another one, allow me to provide a brief synopsis of what a responsible journalist might include to balance the union talking points cited above: We conservatives believe unions have completely destroyed the education system.  They have collectively bargained (which is Union-speak for “community organized”) their way into a position where they are not required to produce results, they are virtually impossible to fire, and they have obscene amounts of benefits.  Thanks to the unions, we have a system where bad teachers are the beneficiaries while good teachers and students suffer.  Raises are doled out based on seniority, not merit, and nothing short of being caught molesting a student in the halls while holding up a photo I.D. will cost you your job.  Yet, when a state and the taxpayers who comprise it stand on the brink of a fiscal crisis, and the unions are asked to chip in just a teensy bit more, they respond by canceling school… in the name of education. (more…)

(St. Louis) Let’s imagine that Washington University’s student government decided to put on a conference on Race. Let’s say they invited Al Sharpton as a guest speaker, and in initial negotiation, agreed to pay him his usual $30-50,000 speaking fee. Finally, let’s say at the last minute, a number of bigoted students protested Sharpton, and then the student government decided to pull the plug on Sharpton out of fear of the protesting, bigoted students.

What do you think Sharpton’s response would be?

You damn well know what it would be.

Sharpton would OWN the media cycle. He’d have the heads of the entire Washington University administration. He’d demand to speak. He’d demand a higher honorarium. He’d demand greater minority employment, and a Wash U contribution to Sharpton’s National Action Network. Plus, he’d want public apologies from dozens of people, sensitivity training for the student government, and a host of other minor concessions. He’d publicly embarrass the students and the school for their patent racism.

So my question for Bristol Palin is: “What concessions are you seeking?”

The lovely, lady Bristol.

Bristol Palin was contacted recently by Washington University in St. Louis’ Student Health Advisory Committee (SHAC)– an adjunct committee of their student government, the student union (SU) – to be the keynote speaker in a 4 person panel on “[sexual] abstinence in a college setting” during the university’s annual “Sex Week.” Previous “Sex Weeks” saw abstinence proponents poorly represented, if at all. SHAC had apparently selected Palin because they thought it would draw positive publicity and discussion to the event.

Not so, however, as the announcement of Bristol’s selection drew an outcry from vocal opponents, who cited peer pressure and general contempt as factors motivating their disapproval of Bristol:

“I have been getting emails, text messages [and] phone calls from people at universities across the country, laughing at me. Everyone is so riled up about this that there’s not even a point of bringing her here, nobody is going to be able to listen,” junior Ryan McCombe said.

And after a day or two of protest attacks against SHAC, the SU capitulated and announced they had axed Bristol from the panel, because, “the controversy surrounding her appearance would overshadow the event’s intended message of sexual responsibility.”

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Background: In my hometown of St. Louis a controversy is afoot. Bristol Palin was invited to be the keynote speaker February 7th at Washington University during the school’s Sexual Responsibility Week. As part of a four-person panel, Palin is slated to discuss abstinence.

Bristol Palin has been selected as keynote speaker for this year’s Sexual Responsibility Week at Washington University.

Student Union Treasury on Tuesday approved a $20,000 appeal by the Student Health Advisory Committee (SHAC) to sponsor a four-person panel featuring Palin. The appeal was initially set at $25,000 and renegotiated.

The $20,000 comes from the Student Activity Fee collected from each undergraduate student at the beginning of the year. The Student Activity Fee is fixed at one percent of tuition.

While Palin has not formally agreed to the appearance yet, she is expected to do so shortly.

I wasn’t even fully aware of what was happening until a number of Wash U student conservatives reached out, upset at their treatment when they would defend the student union’s decision. Protests are organized and two Facebook pages have been created. Above all else the protest against Bristol Palin stems from no other reason than her last name is Palin.

That’s it.

No one knows what sort of speaking fee Palin is collecting yet some left-leaning students immediately assumed it was eleventy frillion dollars and are attempting to use that as justification for their protest – except when you read the comments on Facebook or in the student paper it’s always followed up with some politically-charged remark about her being Palin’s daughter. Also, some in the community don’t believe in redemption or grace, thus think that once you err you are forever doomed thus, no way can Palin be an authority on abstinence, even though she has more experience than most young adults her age at the result of not practicing abstinence.

A young woman is attempting to say something positive, something about which I think we can all agree. From Huffington Post:

While the politically-charged nature of the selection has caused some minor turbulence on campus, one of the organizers behind the event explained to StudLife that her presence would help round out an annual happening that is often criticized for being one-sided.

“We thought a big name like Bristol’s would help to start a dialogue,” Student Health Advisory Committee President Scott Elman told StudLife. “We also wanted to target abstinence because SHAC and Sex Week have been criticized for being too liberal and too one-dimensional, and that the abstinence conversation hasn’t been brought up.”

Sadly because her mother is who she is, some are seeking to silence Bristol Palin’s voice. It’s bullying, plain and simple, all while the “It Gets Better” anti-bullying campaign is all the rage in Hollywood.

Apparently that doesn’t apply to conservative youth. And especially if you mom’s name is Sarah Palin.

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It isn’t just national issues that the Old Media misreports. As we focus on the “big” stories of the day, we often overlook the local scene and the left-wing excuse for “reporting,” therefrom. This is a perfect example of that.

Imagine you are a sophomore in high school and your sex ed teacher forces you to prance about your classroom singing and dancing to “The Vagina Dance” in a puerile attempt to teach the parts and functions of the female sex organ. Worse, imagine you are a male student in a classroom of such an unhinged teacher? Well, we don’t have to imagine it too hard because this exact situation has happened in a classroom in the Chicago, Illinois suburbs. But don’t worry. Chicago’s Old Media is all about reporting this incident honestly. Well, if honestly means to ignore relevant facts and shore up support for the out of control teacher and smooth things over for the school, that is.

Early this month, parent Robert King, whose son goes to Crystal Lake’s Prairie Ridge High School, complained to school authorities over the inappropriate teaching methods of health teacher Jacqulyn Levin. As a teaching tool Levin used “The Vagina Dance,” a song replete with dance steps and arm movements, and required her entire co-ed class to participate in it – all to the tune of The Hokey Pokey, no less. As it happens King’s son was uncomfortable being required to prance about the room, arms emulating fallopian tubes, and singing about vaginas, so the parents complained.

In response the teacher claimed that her song was nothing but a harmless “kinesthetic device” meant to help the kids learn through “fun.” The Illinois Family Institute, however, begs to differ and called the claim, “a rationalization, an obvious and foolish attempt to conceal the inappropriateness and silliness of the activity with a patina of pedagogical legitimacy” (I love how they used edu-speak against the teacher, too. Kudos to that.)

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There are those who think that the 10-15 regular viewers of MSNBC have to have an intelligence level somewhere between burnt toast and potato salad. After all, they are regularly fed progressive propaganda dressed up as news and come back for more.

Today, America’s progressively biased network prove that they too believe their viewers are pretty empty from the neck up, with an on air demonstration of the federal debt ceiling that included one of a reporters Richard Lui,  wearing a white t-shirt. Written on the t-shirt (in red pen) is the word spending, and the reporter is crouching under, you guessed it, a low ceiling. Get it! How creative.

Watch this asinine performance:

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When news first broke of an alleged LGBT-based hate crime at Harvard University, Harvard and the usual suspects on the Left were quick to cry bias, or hate crime. However, new facts and some curious unanswered questions are raising troubling questions around the incident.

HUPD spokesman Steven G. Catalano wrote in an e-mail that the vandalized books’ subject matters included lesbian and gay issues and same-sex marriage. Due to the nature of books, HUPD is currently investigating the incident as a bias crime.

“The HUPD has zero tolerance for any bias-related incidents or crimes,” Catalano said.

“Harvard College will not tolerate acts of vandalism, especially those that appear to be motivated by hate or bias,” Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson. “[As] a community, we will continue to affirm our shared values of dignity and respect for everyone in our community.”

The Huffington Post, along with several other Leftist websites were quick to highlight, releasing their own brand of hate in the comments area.

Harvard LGBT Books Vandalized With Urine

From comments: ”Hate crime. Fingerprin­t. Arrest. Expell. Terminate. Jail,” said JDaddy1951. Other commenters were quick to assign the blame to Christians and insist it was part of a larger trend currently on the rise.

But now in a bizarre twist, it seems the incident wasn’t even reported for two whole weeks and is now claimed to have been an “accident” by a Harvard employee. (more…)

A few days ago the miserable Helen Thomas, famed long-time Washington correspondent, let her hatred for Jews get the best of her once again. At a workshop held in Dearborn, Michigan dedicated to fighting anti-Arab bias in the United States, Thomas came out forcefully against the “Zionists” in Israel and the United States and refused to back away from anti-Jewish comments she’s made in the past.

It seems that Thomas’s latest anti-Jewish comments have caused her to lose support of at least one institution: her own alma mater, Wayne State University. The school from which Thomas graduated in 1942 announced this week that it will no longer be awarding its Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in the Media Award to journalists that “stand out in their field.”

As Wayne State once described the award: “The award was established to recognize her leadership role in promoting diversity in the media and the issues of race in America.”

It seems that “diversity” isn’t something that much interests Thomas, however. As Jeff Dunetz reported on Dec. 4, Thomas launched into yet another anti-Jew attack in Michigan. Wallowing in that old the-Jews-secretly-control-everything trope, Thomas regaled her pro-Arab audience with her anti-Zionist comments.

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A recent event at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute is a prime example of politicized, dumbed down, parodic “education” geared to desensitizing students to the seeking of truth based on evidence and historical facts.

More exactly, this occasion – an opportunity for forty or so students to meet and speak with the radical cartoon journalist Joe Sacco after a discussion of his work with NYU’s Middle East professor Zachary Lockman – degenerated into a crude and perverse forum for smashing the very ideal of journalistic objectivity.

According to Alan Jacobs, a student of Middle Eastern Studies the interchange dealt chiefly with Sacco’s new graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, which uses comic strips to expose alleged Israeli abuses in Gaza in 1956.

Both cartoonist and historian, reports Jacobs, frequently repudiated objectivity, and their radical bias resulted directly in the reviling of Israel.

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Media Matters owes its readers an apology.

In my previous column, “Teachers Unions Gone Wild: The Director’s Commentary (Part 1),” I challenged Media Matters — who pompously mocked Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks for believing in the authenticity of our videos because “[James] told [him]” they were — to hold Alissa Ploshnick and her spokesman Steve Wolmer to the same standard as Brooks.

Steve Wolmer spoke on behalf of Alissa Ploshnick, who is now “in seclusion,” claiming that when editing “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” I maliciously grouped two soundbites of hers together that were allegedly uttered in totally separate contexts. Wolmer claims that Ploshnick’s comment about a teacher calling a student the N word was actually an anecdote about a student-to-student confrontation in her high school days, and “had nothing to do with tenure.” Wolmer explains that we “edited that out and put it in the tenure conversation to make it look like that was the context.”

While I was admittedly tempted to sit back and hear more of their creative fairy tales, I had to set the record straight and release the unedited raw audio of Ploshnick’s dialogue, pulling the rug out from under her and Wolmer’s lies.

What is even more amusing is that Media Matters, after snobbishly chastising Brooks for trusting James’ word that the videos were authentic, flipped a 180 and took at face value Ploshnick’s and Wolmer’s alibis which I have now proven to be undeniable lies. (more…)

James O’Keefe was back in the news this week when his “Teachers Union Gone Wild” investigation of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) went viral and was even praised by Governor Chris Christie.  But not everyone was convinced O’Keefe had hit paydirt; consider the Fox 29 Philadelphia news team among the skeptics.  According to the station, their own Bruce Gordon spent the day in Trenton getting the “context” of the video, and he enthusiastically reported that Mr. O’Keefe and his team may have selectively and maliciously edited the tape to take one particular teacher, Alissa Ploshnick, out of context:

But yesterday, “Teachers Union Gone Wild” director and Big Journalism contributor Christian Hartsock cleared up the discrepancy when he released the full, unedited audio of the sequence.  From Hartsock’s explanation:

NJEA Communications Director Steve Wollmer has come forward on behalf of the “sheltered” Ploshnick, insisting that the recorded talking points of hers we have — including her emphasis on how “hard” it is to fire a tenured teacher, as well as her sharing of an anecdote in which a tenured teacher called a student the “N” word only to be slapped on the wrist with a demotion — were manipulatively tossed into the same context when they were uttered in totally separate contexts.

Wollmer explains that Ploshnick was recounting an episode from her own high school days in Clifton High twenty years ago, in which a mere student called another student the “N” word in the hallway, insinuating it was shared in a totally separate context from her emphasis on how hard it is to fire tenured teachers.

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Did I separate the two soundbites to accommodate a voice-over punctuation in between? Yes I did. But now, I will present to you the monolithic clip incorporating both soundbites side-by-side which she has since claimed to be uttered on separate terms:

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