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Memphis professor behind racist tweets resurfaces at crosstown school

A Memphis professor who left her job under a cloud after a series of racist tweets and Facebook posts has resurfaced at a school across town, where some of her new faculty peers are not happy to have her as a colleague.
Zandria Robinson, who taught sociology at University of Memphis until resigning on June 11, had previously posted on Facebook and Twitter that she did not want her daughter attending school with “snotty privileged whites,” apparently ramped up her social media rhetoric after leaving the job. In a series of tweets that began June 26, nine days after white racist Dylann Roof gunned down nine African Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church, Robinson wrote that “whiteness is most certainly and inevitably terror” and said she expected to see “thinkpieces about how more mental health services could prevent white people from acting how they are conditioned to act.”
Officials at Rhodes College announced Robinson's hiring last week, and praised her for her "provocative" comments, some of which were first reported by the website SoCawlege.
"As a leading scholar and author in the areas of race, class, gender, culture, and the South, Dr. Zandria Robinson’s comments are sometimes provocative, controversial, and debatable," the school said in a statement.
However, not all professors are in full support of the controversial hiring. Rhodes College Economics Professor John Murray told National Review that the school is trying to counter bad publicity from a year ago, when people posting from on or just off campus wrote racist comments on the anonymous social media app Yik Yak. But he said hiring someone who made racists statements from a different perspective made little sense.
“It does seem kind of crazy that we’re inviting a person to come teach on our faculty who seems to dislike a chunk of our students,” Murray said.
University of Memphis spokeswoman Gabrielle Maxey told FoxNews.com Robinson was not fired, despite earlier reports.
"She resigned on June 11,” Maxey said.
Robinson has a climactic history of racially-provocative posts on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Robinson could not be reached for comment.

SC Senate votes to take down flag; House OK still needed

Burn all them books too!

 

COLUMBIA, S.C. –  The South Carolina Senate voted Monday to pull the Confederate flag off the Capitol grounds, clearing the way for a historic measure that could remove the banner more than five decades after it was first flown above the Statehouse to protest integration.
A second vote will be needed Tuesday to send the proposal to the House, where it faces a less certain future. But Monday's 37-3 vote was well over the two-thirds majority needed to advance the bill.
If the House passes the same measure, the flag and flagpole could be removed as soon as Gov. Nikki Haley signs the papers. The flag would be lowered for the last time and shipped off to the state's Confederate Relic Room, near where the last Confederate flag to fly over the Statehouse dome is stored.
The vote came at the end of a day of debate in which several white senators said they had come to understand why their black colleagues felt the flag no longer represented the valor of Southern soldiers but the racism that led the South to separate from the United States more than 150 years ago.
As the senators spoke, the desk of their slain colleague, Clementa Pinckney, was still draped in black cloth. Pinckney and eight other black people were fatally shot June 17 during Bible study at a historic African-American church in Charleston. Authorities have charged a gunman who posed for pictures with the rebel banner. Police say he was driven by racial hatred.
Several senators said the grace shown by the families of the victims willing to forgive the gunman also changed their minds.
"We now have the opportunity, the obligation, to put the exclamation point on an extraordinary narrative of good and evil, of love and mercy that will take its place in the history books," said Sen. Tom Davis, a Republican.
After the vote, Sen. Vincent Sheheen, a Democrat whose suggestion that the flag be taken down while running for governor last year was called a "stunt" by Haley, was given a high-five from a fellow legislator.
"I thought it would happen, but never this fast," Sheheen said.
Republican Sen. Larry Martin, who for decades fought off attempts to remove the flag from Statehouse grounds, said the church shooting drew him to the same conclusion that his black colleague arrived at long ago — that the rebel flag "has more to do with what was going on in the 1960s as opposed to the 1860s."
Martin, who is white, had family who came to South Carolina's then-rugged northern backcountry from Scotland in the early 1800s. That was about the time the enslaved relatives of Sen. Darrell Jackson, a black Democrat, involuntary ended up near Columbia.
Jackson helped write the compromise that took the Confederate flag off the Statehouse dome in 2000 and put it in its current location on a pole on the Capitol's front lawn.
On Monday, he said his great-grandfather's brother fled a plantation and joined the Union army when Gen. William Sherman came storming through Columbia.
Jackson said he regretted not going further to get rid of the flag completely 15 years ago. But he welcomed the chance now to honor his great-grandfather, Ishmael Jackson, who escaped to freedom.
"You said we lost the war. No we didn't. Not Ishmael Jackson and the 57 percent of people who looked like him. As far as they are concerned, they won the war," Jackson said.
The Senate rejected three amendments. One would have put a different Confederate flag on the pole. A second would fly the flag only on Confederate Memorial Day, and the third would leave the flag's fate up to a popular vote.
State Sen. Lee Bright, who suggested the popular vote, said the Confederate flag has been misused by people like Dylann Roof, who is charged with murder in the church shootings and who posed in pictures with the rebel banner.
"I'm more against taking it down in this environment than any other time just because I believe we're placing the blame of what one deranged lunatic did on the people that hold their Southern heritage high," said Bright, a Republican.
The flag still has at least a few days to fly, even with Haley, business leaders and civil rights proponents wanting it down as soon as possible. There are indications the proposal could have a tougher road in the House. Some powerful Republicans have not said how they will vote, including Speaker Jay Lucas.
Some Republicans want to keep the flagpole and put a different flag on it. Suggestions have included the U.S. flag, the South Carolina flag and a flag that may have been flown by Confederate troops but does not have the same connections as the red banner with the blue cross and white stars.
House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford vowed that no Democrat would vote for a bill that leaves the flagpole up.
The bill is expected to be sent directly to the House floor Wednesday with several amendments offered, said Republican Rep. Greg Delleney, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which would normally receive the bill before it got to the floor.
If any amendments pass, a conference committee would probably be needed to hash out differences.

Congressional deadline could stop the clock on Iran nuke talks

Time is running out for U.S. negotiators trying to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. Not only are they racing to meet a self-imposed Tuesday deadline, but even if that slips they'll run against a hard deadline Thursday that Congress set earlier this year.
Whether the U.S. and five other world powers can reach any agreement remains to be seen. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that diplomatic efforts "could go either way."
Talks were initially extended past a June 30 deadline until Tuesday. Officials, though, already have acknowledged the talks could leak past that deadline, too.
Yet Thursday may be the deadline that matters.
July 9 is the date U.S. lawmakers set for negotiators to complete a deal if they want Congress to review it within 30 days. If an agreement is submitted after July 9, Congress claims the right to take 60 days to review the text -- which could push a final congressional vote on the plan until September, leaving any agreement in limbo until then.
Bloomberg View recently reported that Colin Kahl, Vice President Biden's national security adviser, has called July 9 the "real political deadline."
A senior administration official, speaking with reporters on Friday, played down the July 9 deadline but admitted they'd prefer to get a deal in hand before then.
Already, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has set a hearing on the matter for Thursday, beginning the process of reviewing a potential deal. Whether that timeline is 30 or 60 days depends on when and if it comes in.
"This hearing will be the first in a series the Committee will hold should the Administration strike what might be one of the most significant agreements in decades. As I have said, no deal is far better than a bad deal," committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a statement.
Diplomats from all six nations were back in Vienna Monday for the presumed final leg of talks.
The EU's top foreign policy official, Federica Mogherini, said agreement was "very close." But Kerry said there was still a ways to go.
"We are not yet where we need to be on several of the most critical issues," Kerry told reporters outside the 19th-century Viennese palace that has hosted the negotiations.
World powers and Iran are hoping to clinch a deal soon, setting a decade of restrictions on Iran's nuclear program and granting Iran significant relief from international sanctions.
Kerry met for 3 1/2 hours on Sunday with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, as top diplomats from the five other negotiating countries planned to return to Austria's capital later in the evening.
"It is now time to see whether or not we are able to close an agreement," Kerry said.
While "genuine progress" had been made and the sides "have never been closer, at this point, this negotiation could go either way. If the hard choices get made in the next couple of days, and made quickly, we could get an agreement this week," Kerry said. "But if they are not made, we will not."
The talks had appeared to be moving forward. On Saturday, diplomats reported tentative agreement on the speed and scope of sanctions relief for Iran in the accord, even as issues such as inspection guidelines and limits on Iran's nuclear research and development remained contentious.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke of "sharper" deal contours.
"But that shouldn't deceive us," he said. "There's still a possibility that there will be a lack of courage and readiness in crucial points to build the bridges that we need to find to each other."
Tuesday's deadline is the latest that has been set for a comprehensive pact that would replace the interim deal world powers and Iran reached in November 2013. That package was extended three times, most recently on June 30, and Kerry appeared to be partly addressing critics of the diplomacy in the United States  who've argued that President Obama's administration has been too conciliatory over the course of  the negotiations. 
Obama and U.S. officials say that is untrue. But they've also fiercely defended their overtures to Tehran and their willingness to allow the Iranians to maintain significant nuclear infrastructure, on the argument that a diplomatic agreement is preferable to military conflict.

CDC official called Obama ‘Marxist,’ ‘amateur’ over 2014 border surge

A federal health official dealing with the surge of illegal immigrants last year at the southern U.S. border ripped President Obama for the months-long crisis, calling him a "Marxist" and “the worst pres we have ever had,” according to newly released internal emails.
The emails, obtained and published by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, show a June 9, 2014, exchange between Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logistics specialist George Roark and agency public health adviser William Adams.
Roark begins by writing: “Unreal, no country in the world would allow this.”
Adams responds: “Well, in ten years or less, they’ll all be voting … Commander’s intent …”
Roark concludes: "It is very clear that is the case. This fellow is the worst pres we have ever had. He truly is ‘the amateur’ but a Marxist, too.” 
Roark declined to talk to FoxNews.com on Monday, when reached by phone at the agency’s Atlanta headquarters. The CDC has yet to respond to a question about whether the agency addressed the email exchange with Roark or Adams, and whether either was reprimanded or punished.
Judicial Watch said it obtained the emails as part of an investigation into the CDC activating its Emergency Operations Center to deal with tens of thousands Central American immigrants, including many unaccompanied minors, trying to get into the United States at the Mexico border.
The center was opened to address concerns about the border-crossers’ health and the potential for them to bring contagious diseases and other illnesses into the country.
The Roark-Adams exchange was included in about 3,000 pages of emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, and more documents related to the Judicial Watch investigation are forthcoming, the group said Monday.
The U.S. law that gives some protection to illegal immigrants from non-bordering countries -- and puts unaccompanied minors into the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services -- was in fact signed by President George W. Bush in December 2008, days before Obama took office.
Judicial Watch also found in its investigation a June 18, 2014, email in which CDC intelligence analyst Daniel Bubacz said the situation that summer was the result of a “Leave No Child on the other Side of the Border Policy” -- a reference to the controversial federal education policy known as No Child Left Behind.