New York University is in hot water over a lawsuit filed this week, in which a professor alleges that the prestigious university fired him for giving Hollywood Celebrity James Franco (Spiderman, 127 Hours) a D. Franco had been pursuing a Master’s in Fine Arts degree from the school, when he enrolled in Jose Angel Santana’s “Directing the Actor II” class.   Santana said the star had missed 12 of 14 classes that semester.

Santana is alleging the University created a hostile work environment for allowing Franco to publicly ridicule him and then they showed him the door.

“The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana, 58, told The New York Post. “The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.”

Santana is suing for damages and back wages over the issue.  He says that the star had been just as excessively absent in his other classes also but the University bent over backwards to make sure the actor looked good and got his good grades.

It is not uncommon for schools to make huge sums of money, having Hollywood celebrities attend their programs.  The PR value alone cannot be underestimated. After his stint there as a student, Franco even became a student teaching a course on poetry the following semester.

Santana suggested that Franco received good grades for hiring one of the Universities other professors, Jay Anania, to help him adapt a script.

Do you think actors should be given special treatment when they take classes at Universities or should they be expected to adhere to the same standard as other students?

NYU Professor: I Was Fired For Giving James Franco a D is a post from: The Inquisitr

Ralph Peters is at it again, this time with a nutty, fearmongering New York Post op-ed that’s full of conspiracy theory insinuation about how the President is a seekrit Muslim.

Peters, who you may recall for his loud death-wishing at missing American Soldier Bowe Bergdahl, (whose status remains “missing/captured”) has a recent book and it appears he is trying to promote it by preying on xenophobia and general free-floating fear in the wake of last week’s Fort Hood massacre. Completely peeing all over the many Muslim men and women who serve this country bravely overseas and at home every day, Peters weaves an islamofascist conspiracy so thick and colorful it made that Da Vinci Code writer guy jealous. True story.

Peters seems unable or, more likely, unwilling to connect the tragedy at Fort Hood to the countless other lone-nutbag shootings we see in America. He happened to be Muslim, but Timothy McVeigh happened to be white and American just like many other lone mass killers before him. Peters claims Obama is “unwilling” to call the act “terror,” “let alone the phrase ‘Islamist terror,’” instead cautioning Americans not to “rush to judgment.” Urging to think critically rather than tar a whole segment of the American population with a terrorism brush is, to Peters, an offensive level of inaction. Peters says:

Imagine if, instead of Fort Hood, the massacre had gone down at a mosque in Detroit — carried out by a maddened Christian or Jew. Obama would’ve been aboard Air Force One before the pilots had time to file a flight plan and he would’ve been on site before the gun smoke cleared, hugging and boo-hooing and dispensing stirring rhetoric for the evening news.

Okay, so we should assume instead if a Jew shot up a Mosque, Obama would come out with guns blazing against Israel because it was some kind of Jewish conspiracy? No, that would be crazy. Because Peters’ assertions are crazy. And offensive, and ugly and misguided and pandering to the portion of our population that thought we should melt down part of Saddam Hussein’s palaces to rebuild the World Trade Center. Understanding- truly understanding- who attacked this country on September 11th and why is far more important to national security than making tenuous connections between lone acts and real, large scale terror attacks.

Peters feels that the Army is colluding to obscure the fact that shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan was motivated by his Muslim faith. Newsflash, sir. Crazy killers are often motivated by faith, whatever faith to which they subscribe. They frequently have large delusions surrounding their significance in the world and feel that they and they alone can carry out God’s will on Earth. Muslim has little to do with it, aside from it coming in this flavor this time. Arrogance and religious fervor is the true culprit in many situations like this.

Peters asks:

How many more Americans have to die, at home and in war, before our president admits that there is, indeed, such a thing as Islamist terror? Will he ever admit that it played a role in the tragedy at Fort Hood?

Could it be- could Americans (and countless Iraqi and Afghani civilians) be dying because of an ill-conceived, totally misguided foray into a tumultuous region with no clearly defined goals and no exit strategy, and of course, no strong connection to the attacks they were carried out to avenge? Peters also mentions that President Obama didn’t “lose his fabled cool” when told of the attack. Yes, he sat in a classroom calmly reading The Pet Goat while the lower half of my city burned from the deliberate sacrifice of two crowded airliners. Oh no, wait. That was his predecessor.

To lay this tragedy at the feet of the current administration is deliberate self-deception at its very worst- if anyone sowed what we just experienced at Fort Hood it was most certainly during the preceding eight years and not this one. If Army policies of deliberate political correctness truly spawned this tragedy, wouldn’t those have been in place far longer than the ten months President Obama has been in office? Indeed, one criticism heard time and again of the Obama administration is that he hasn’t done enough yet. Are we to believe he’s quietly been working behind the scenes all this time to… facilitate a random murder of troops on our home soil?

Ralph Peters and the Islamofascist Fort Hood boogeyman is a post from: The Inquisitr

New York Post Cartoon Controversy

The cartoon, created by Sean Delonas and printed in Wednesday’s New York Post, shows police shooting a chimp dead, then saying: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Chimp Attack Connection

The image is presumably related to an incident in Stamford, Connecticut on Monday in which a chimpanzee escaped a woman’s home and attacked her friend. Officers ended up shooting and killing the animal.

The caption in Delonas’ New York Post cartoon is being interpreted by some as a reference to Obama, since — while he didn’t actually author it — he was the driving force behind the recently passed stimulus bill. The Rev. Al Sharpton tells the Associated Press the image is “troubling at best, given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys.” Sharpton also called upon the Post to clarify its intentions with the drawing.

NY Post Chimp Cartoon Response

The New York Post countered Sharpton’s statement and declared it was standing behind the cartoon. The publication’s editor-in-chief issued the following response:

“The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.”

Cartoonist Sean Delonas went on to call Sharpton’s accusations “absolutely friggin’ ridiculous” during a phone interview with CNN Wednesday afternoon.

“Do you really think I’m saying Obama should be shot? I didn’t see that in the cartoon,” he said. “It’s about the economic stimulus bill. If you’re going to make that about anybody, it would be [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, which it’s not.”

New York Post Cartoon: Connecting Chimp Attack With Obama? is a post from: The Inquisitr