UMBC is an institutional member of the Sloan-C College Pass program and has approximately 70 free seats to be used towards their workshops. The 2012 workshops include such topics as Getting Started in Online Teaching, Academic Integrity in Online Education, Copyright Compliance, Second Life and Improving Student Engagement in Online Courses. UMBC full time and part time faculty can access the required College Pass Coupon Code by going to this URL: http://www.umbc.edu/oit/hybrid/support/downloads/index.php. You will need to be logged in to myUMBC in order to access this webpage.

The UMBC Blackboard server will be down for three hours of scheduled maintenance from 10 pm Friday, Jan. 27 to 1 am Saturday, Jan. 28. DoIT staff will be performing MS Windows Server maintenance and updates during this time.

We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconveniences that this down time may cause.

Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona has announced that she will be stepping down this week to focus on her recovery, stated in the video above that her camp released.

Giffords was the victim of an assassination attempt in January 2011 in her home state, an attack that injured 13 people and killed six.

Suffering a gunshot wound to the head, Giffords spent the months following recovering her ability to speak, read, and write. In August, she returned to the house to vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling.

Giffords says she hope to return to public office.

Poor Rick Santorum. After finishing third in South Carolina, he just got glitter-bombed. Again.

Members of the occupy Charleston movement hurled glitter at Rick while screaming “Gay rights!” and “Occupy!” Perhaps not quite the consolation prize he was looking for.

Santorum has a long track record as an opponent of gay rights.

Perhaps the most violent controversy was spurred by a 2003 interview during which some claim he equated gay marriage with bestiality and pedophilia. (An excerpt of the interview transcript is here).

More recently, he was booed by students during an interview in New Hampshire when he repeatedly brought up polygamy during a series of questions about gay marriage.

Even Meghan McCain (daughter of Sen. John McCain) has gone on the record calling Santorum’s views “dated,” and, “gross”.

Santorum may be confused as to what gay marriage actually is. We recommend someone show him this handy diagram, stat.

Newt Gingrich’s triumph in the recent South Carolina Primary has been largely attributed to his sharp performances in two recent televised debates.

The signature highlight of debate #1 was a confrontation Newt had with Fox News correspondent and former-NPR reporter Juan Williams.

Williams asked Newt Gingrich if calling President Obama the “Food Stamps President” could be considered offensive to low-income people and people of color.

Gingrich’s indignant response, showcased in the clip above, largely blew-off the question. Williams followed up the former Speaker of the House’s response with his assertion that Gingrich might be coming across as “belittling people.”

Gingrich dismissed the claim.

Clearly “Food Stamp President” was meant to be a pejorative slam. But it’s not a surprise that the statement carries a racial connotation for many.

It is reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign term “Welfare Queens” that many studies have shown carry a clear racial code. Representative Clyburn and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee condemned the label as racially coded.

“Food stamps” is the now-outdated term for SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that President Bush had a large part in rebranding and de-stigmatizing.

When taking a look at the hard numbers, the President who hailed the largest number of food stamps recipients and who experienced the largest program growth was President George W. Bush, with a 63% jump in recipients and an increase in recipients for 7 out of his 8 years in office.

What was arguably more despicable was Gingrich’s pointed comment about Juan Williams after the debate:

I had a very interesting dialogue Monday night in Myrtle Beach with Juan Williams about the idea of work, which seemed to Juan Williams to be a strange, distant concept.

Hmm, not sure we follow you there, Newt. Especially when considering the way Williams reacted during the debate – oh, and the fact that Williams has been pretty prominently employed as a journalist, author, and commentator for years.

We tend to agree with this quote by senior editor at The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates, which pretty much sums it up:

The notion that Gingrich is somehow unaware of that “food stamp president” has racial connotations, that he is being on the level when he says the black community should not be satisfied with food stamps, requires an extension of supernatural generosity.

South Carolina Primary final numbers, courtesy Current.com

Before any of the numbers were in last night, Newt Gingrich was declared the victor of the first Republican primary in the South by all of the major news networks.

Exit polls showed that Gingrich was double-digits ahead of Mitt Romney, a candidate that has been struggling with media coverage and losing popularity after Gingrich’s attack on Romney, in which he painted the Massachusetts Governor as a moderate and exploitative capitalist for his work at Bain Capital.

Many commentators are predicting a similar outcome in Florida, the next primary stop. Other commentators suspect a Santorum drop-out, with the possibility of a Gingrich endorsement. All in all, the three votes so far do not point to a clear winner, with each of the three showings declaring three unique outcomes.

To see the final numbers from the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, click the image above.