Newt tells it like it is

Quicksearch

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Wednesday, January 18. 2012

Newt tells it like it is

I waited on tables and cleaned bathrooms during college. What's wrong with that? It did me good. h/t Bookworm:

Posted by The News Junkie at 11:19 | Comments (22) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

PingBack

Weblog: blogs.dailymail.com
Tracked: Jan 18, 17:01

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Yes, but should we take away the janitor's livelihood---which he uses to support his family---to give a job to 30 high school students? That's what Newt suggests.

#1 tadcf on 2012-01-18 11:39 (Reply)

Certainly. I went to a fancy private prep school, and each one of us kids was on a school work crew every day for 4 years.

#1.1 bd on 2012-01-18 11:59 (Reply)

I worked as a janitor in my high school. Back in the late 70's there was no shame or stigma to it. We all worked after school doing something.

#1.1.1 phil g on 2012-01-18 14:03 (Reply)

Absolutely. My kids attended public schools in an urban area known for unions and supported by the highest property taxes for such an area. We couldn't get the idiotic janitors to supply toilet paper in the students' restrooms. The paint was peeling in the teachers' lunch/meeting room and one of the parents offered his workers to spruce it up for free. No dice. Against union rules. We wanted to hold a fundraiser on a Friday evening (when most of the parents and community members were able to attend), but a janitor, by union rules, had to be in attendance and not one would show up without being paid triple wages (about $120/hour with a minimum of six hours = $720) for the event. And I could go on and on and on and on...

I worked from age 10 on. It felt good to do a job and get paid -- sometimes not as much as I thought I deserved, but enough to make me a better worker and, eventually, a better employer.

Juan Williams disgraces the field of journalism as do most of the faces blabbering on the TV/radio today. It's turned into a "gotcha" form of wild west democracy. No rules, no jury... just a hanging. No matter what one thinks of Newt, he made Juan out to be the fool he is. Thanks, Newt.

#1.2 jma on 2012-01-18 18:32 (Reply)

here’s another odd thing about it. On one hand, America is obsessed with black dysfunction, black low academic achievement, black criminality, black unemployment, lack of a black work ethic, lack of black family formation, black overall failure, etc., and what to do to solve these problems.
On the other hand, if a Republican politician reasonably suggests that it would be a good thing for young black men to gain work experience and a work ethic by starting in a humble job like janitor, that is seen as an insult to blacks! The implication being that blacks are all so well-functioning and successful that it would be beneath them to be janitors!

So which is it, Mr. Williams? Are there indeed serious problems with black functionality and black employment, as the liberal media are constantly telling us, or are blacks so talented and accomplished that it’s an insult to suggest that they start at modest jobs?

If Gingrich had made this argument to Williams, it would have been even more sensational.

#2 Yuan on 2012-01-18 11:43 (Reply)

The News Junkie: I waited on tables and cleaned bathrooms during college.

He wasn't referring to college students, but kids. Can't imagine a problem with a poor black kid washing toilets while the other kids pick on him and throw buckets of slime. Builds character.

30-1 is not even a plausible ratio.

#3 Zachriel on 2012-01-18 12:26 (Reply)

Newt has said over and over again that adults should do the heavy janitorial work, while students would do jobs like sweeping, helping at the food service, library, etc. This stuff about kids cleaning toilets is completely false.

It's almost fifty years since I finished grade school, so maybe things have changed, but I remember that most of my classmates were eager to get whatever small jobs --unpaid- were available. They were a status symbol and a break from classroom routine. Almost invariably, they would go the the "teacher's pets."

#3.1 Burke on 2012-01-18 12:40 (Reply)

I worked cleaning toilets from age 14. Also did "heavy" janitorial work like VCT floor maintenance using caustic chemicals and stripping/scrubbing/buffing machinery. Should I have been protected from that? I gained a lot of maturity from that job!

I tell my current students that the most important thing to have on their resume is a job -- any job, as long as there is a real supervisor who a potential employer can phone up and inquire about your work ethic and punctuality.

#3.2 Douglas2 on 2012-01-18 13:03 (Reply)

I cleaned toilets at my high school in the 70's. No one thought anything of it as everyone worked or was trying to find work after school. I worked for the custodial department at my college and was assigned the coolest facility, the music department. I was responsible for keeping that whole building clean and got to fool around with some cool instruments at the same time. My next job as in the broom shop making brooms. I worked my way up to stitching and winding the broooms. Hated that job. Paid much better, but I had much more fun and satisfaction from owning the responsibility for the music department building.

#3.3 phil g on 2012-01-18 14:10 (Reply)

In grade school I crawled under my uncle's apple trees and picked up apples that had fallen for squeezing into cider, through long grass with snakes and bugs and picking up applies that often had hornets burrowed into them.

In high school I worked at a car dealership. I was the used car kid. I washed them, I started them (or jumped them if they didn't start), I cleaned them out (scraping nicotine off of the inside of windshields that was so thick it came off in ribbons on my razor blade).

In college - one that can fairly be designated "elite" - I worked in food service and in the labs. After I got married between my junior and senior year there I worked in a lab (in my home area, not at school) for a summer and a semester. When I went back to school we lived in a basement and I worked as a grocery cashier and a cab driver (I still worked in the labs, but for credit, not cash).

When I went back to graduate school I delivered pizzas.

So I have little sympathy to "Kids shouldn't have to work." Yeah, rich kids might not have to. So what? You're not rich. You're not going to be insulated from the consequences of that after you get out of school so you might as well learn that now. Suck it up and get to work.

Mind you, I'd push that schools have rules that every kid works for a particular period of time. But a failure to get that is not a deal killer. Of course, the school maintenance staff union will bitch. Too bad for them. In looking around my kids' schools there's plenty they could be doing while the kids scrape gum off of the bottom of chairs and wash off the desks, floors and walls.

#4 RonF on 2012-01-18 12:36 (Reply)

Newt Gingrich's Poverty Code
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-13-2011/newt-gingrich-s-poverty-code

#5 Zachriel on 2012-01-18 13:01 (Reply)

RonF... Your story is a familiar one to me. I started working in summers when I was 16, and did so every year until I got my baccalaureate. Never did the cleaning toilet thing until the summer before I entered freshman year. But I put in 6 days a week that summer as a ward aide in a big hospital, and had responsibility for cleaning up the break room as well as emptying bed pans. After my freshman year in college, I went to work that summer at a manufacturing company as a relief telephone operator. Learned how to send telegraph messages for the bosses as well as work the telephone board. I was kind of proud of knowing how to do these things, figuring that if I became a writer I could use the experience as background. I didn't do yard work, because homeowners preferred guys for that. But my generation, no matter how "elite" the colleges we attended were, were expected by our parents to work in the summer. And the concept of "spring break", which modern college students cling to, was never one we participated in. We were too close to the days of The Depression to feel comfortable swanning around and being annoying. Of course, I started college in 1947 and graduated in 1951 and the frightening days of the Second World War were still fresh in our minds

At any rate, i have no sympathy for the whiners who are complaining that they can't get a job. They just aren't looking, that's all. The more different kinds of experience you have, the more valuable you'll be as an employee and as a person.

Marianne

#6 Marianne Matthews on 2012-01-18 13:28 (Reply)

This was just fantastic theatre with truth by Gingrich. I don't want him as President, but I'd love to see him in a position where his oratory and debate skills could be put to good work such as US representative to the UN or Secretary of State.

#7 phil g on 2012-01-18 14:18 (Reply)

Oh and Juan Williams is a DOPE. He was a dope on PBS' McNeil Hour and he's a dope on Fox.

#8 phil g on 2012-01-18 14:20 (Reply)

Did JW suggest creating opportunities for poor, young people to work will hurt their feelings? That's the sum of his argument, right? This seems to be a major component of the progressive's litmus test for political correctness. Juan must see identity groups he favors doing menial labor as somehow shameful. Irrespective of the benefits that accrue to those individuals working for their pay, like pride of ownership and accomplishment, they should somehow find it a greater and more liberating act to take charity? It's better then to identify themselves more strongly with a victim group, rather than with individual achievement? I cannot wrap my head around that kind of thinking. It is, in itself, shameful.

#9 Jephnol (Link) on 2012-01-18 17:46 (Reply)

You all fail to understand the liberal mindset.
It has nothing to do with logic.
It is about power, logic be damned, fairness be damned, history be damned, the Constitution be damned, America be damned, and especially white Americans be damned.
Gimme! You owe me!
Understand now? You are not in a high school debate.

#10 PacRim Jim (Link) on 2012-01-18 20:35 (Reply)

"It is about power, logic be damned, "

It's actually more insidious than that. The left considers blacks to be an inferior race of people. To them, a successful black person is akin to a bear riding a bicycle. The real racists are now and always have been on the left. This is why they feel compelled to keep harping on what a freak genius Brakabama is. The fact that he doesn't talk like Uncle Remus is just short of a miracle to them.

#11 ccoffer on 2012-01-19 11:02 (Reply)

ccoffer: It's actually more insidious than that. The left considers blacks to be an inferior race of people. To them, a successful black person is akin to a bear riding a bicycle.

Enough of that.

ccoffer: The real racists are now and always have been on the left.

As it was those on the Left that led the civil rights movement, and as most blacks vote more liberally, that is contrary to the historical facts.

#11.1 Zachriel on 2012-01-19 11:20 (Reply)

"As it was those on the Left that led the civil rights movement,"

You're a liar. MLK was a conservative republican. Conservative republicans were responsible for the civil rights movement. Jim Crow laws were written by the left on behalf of their allies in the union gang movement.

Nice try.

#12 ccoffer on 2012-01-19 13:58 (Reply)

ccoffer: MLK was a conservative republican.

You have an odd definition of "conservative". King intended to transform the American political system and upturn the racist culture of the South. That is hardly conservative, the preservation of existing institutions. Furthermore, the Left is defined as the support for social change to create a more egalitarian society, certainly King's primary goal.

In his own time, King was usually called a liberal, though some accused him of being a communist. He wasn't a communist, but certainly associated with them. King also came out against the war in Vietnam, and actively campaigned for government action to help the poor and dispossessed.

King on the Vietnam War: They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954—in 1945 rather—after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them.

King on Poverty: So it is obvious that if man is to redeem his spiritual and moral "lag", he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the "haves" and the "have nots" of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.

#12.1 Zachriel on 2012-01-19 15:04 (Reply)

"You have an odd definition of "conservative"."

Only if, by odd, you mean accurate. The people today who seek to ensure that black men are treated like retarded children are leftists like you. There are no policy positions King had that aren't shared by the conservative movement.

Viet Nam was LBJ's war, you halfwit. Was he a conservative??

Lies are all you people have left. No ethos. No morality. No decency. Just contempt for truth.

#13 coffer on 2012-01-19 16:08 (Reply)

coffer: Viet Nam was LBJ's war

The Americans began stumbling into Vietnam as early as the Eisenhower Administration. Generally, conservatives were more hawkish on the Vietnam War, so LBJ was trying to politically outflank his right. This was all apparent at the time, and documented in the presidential tapes.

coffer: There are no policy positions King had that aren't shared by the conservative movement.

That is incorrect. King supported affirmative action, direct aid to the poor, and opposed the Vietnam War as an extension of colonialism. Along with civil rights legislation, often opposed by conservatives, these were all liberal positions. He was assassinated while in Memphis, supporting a public workers union strike.

King: The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.

#13.1 Zachriel on 2012-01-19 16:32 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email	(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications. Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u], [url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: BBCode format allowed
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry

Maggie's Farm

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

RSS Readers

Wednesday, January 18. 2012

Newt tells it like it is