World News Korner

Courtesy of USA Today:

The Texas Board of Education used a late-night meeting to preliminarily approve new science textbooks for classrooms across the state late Thursday night, but it blocked signing off on a major new biology text until alleged "errors" in lessons over the theory of evolution are checked by outside experts.

The vote just before midnight did not reject the biology book by Pearson, one of the country's largest publishers. But it delayed approval until three board members appoint a trio of outside experts to check concerns.

Textbook and classroom curriculum battles have long raged in Texas pitting creationists — those who see God's hand in the creation of the universe — against academics who worry about religious and political ideology trumping scientific fact. At issue this time are proposed high school biology books that could be used across the state at least through 2022.

Publishers from around the country submitted proposed textbooks this summer, but committees of Texas volunteer reviewers — some nominated by socially conservative current and former Board of Education members — raised objections. One argued that creationism based on biblical texts should be taught in science classes, while others objected that climate change wasn't as settled a scientific matter as some of the proposed books said.

Pearson and many other major publishers weren't willing to make suggested major edits and changes, however.

That promoted some of the board's socially conservative members to call for delaying approval of the book because of concerns including how long it took Earth to cool and objection to lessons about natural selection because "selection operates as a selective but not a creative force."

Members outside the socially conservative bloc claimed their colleagues waited until the dead of night to try and impose ideological edits.

"To ask me — a business degree major from Texas Tech University — to distinguish whether the Earth cooled 4 billion years ago or 4.2 billion years ago for purposes of approving a textbook at 10:15 on a Thursday night is laughable," said Thomas Ratliff, a Republican from Mount Pleasant.

He added: "I believe this process is being hijacked, this book is being held hostage to make political changes."

Damn I am tired of this crap.

how about we declare a truce, we won't insist that scientifically verifiable facts be placed in the Bible, and these idiots can stop trying to sneak their belief system into our science books.

Seem fair?

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Courtesy of CBS News:

George Zimmerman is being held without bail on charges that he threatened his girlfriend with a shotgun.

Zimmerman, 30, was taken into custody Monday afternoon following a disturbance call at a home in Apopka, Fla., about 15 miles from Orlando, according to Chief Deputy Dennis Lemma of the Seminole County Sheriff's office.

In a 911 call released later Monday, Samantha Scheibe told police that Zimmerman had smashed a glass table, broken her sunglasses and pointed a shotgun in her face.

"You put your gun in my freaking face," Scheibe is heard telling Zimmerman on the call. "Get out of my house. Do not push me out of my house. Please get out of my house."

Seconds later, she can be heard telling the dispatcher, "He pushed me out of my house and locked me out. ... He knows how to do this. He knows how to play this game."

After police arrived on the scene, Zimmerman placed his own 911 call.

"I have a girlfriend, who for lack of a better word, has gone crazy on me," Zimmerman said. He said that he never pulled a gun on his girlfriend, and that it was Scheibe who smashed a table at the home.

He also told the dispatcher that Scheibe was pregnant with their child and that she had decided she would raise the child on her own. When Zimmerman started to leave, "she got mad," he said.

When the dispatcher asked why Zimmerman had called 911 instead of talking to the police officers who were outside the home, he said, "I just want everyone to know the truth."

Lemma told reporters that the girlfriend told police she is not pregnant.

Here is a link to the police conference, with a few more details.

Let's face it this guy thinks he can get away with anything, and will not stop being a danger to his community and anybody who gets close to him until he is locked away.

Update: Here is video of Zimmerman's arraignment during which we learn that he had also choked his girlfriend a week and a half ago.

I would expect nothing less from a POS who needs a gun to make him feel like a man.

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The danger of blaming natural things on the supernatural, and of living our lives with our logic clouded by superstitious nonsense, cannot be overstated.



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Photo courtesy of the City of Wasilla website.

Courtesy of the Frontiersman:

Would you pay the Kelley Blue Book value of $2,318 for a 1999 Ford Expedition in excellent condition? If it had fewer than 75,000 miles, would you pay more? How much would that sport utility vehicle be worth if you knew it had been driven by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin?

The city of Wasilla hopes the answer to that last question is at least $10,000. That’s the minimum bid the city has set in an eBay.com ad for the city vehicle Palin drove while she was Wasilla mayor. The 5.4-liter Expedition XLT model, gold in color, was purchased new in 1999 and was Palin’s official vehicle until she left office in 2002.

Cashing in on Palin’s cachet is absolutely the idea behind the online ad, Wasilla Mayor Verne Rupright said.

“This was her mayor-mobile,” Rupright said. “Sarah had that for the rest of the time she was mayor, so we look at it this way. When you stop and think of who drove that, … why not get the biggest bang for the dollar for the city? Who knows, maybe some rich somebody from somewhere wants (Palin’s former vehicle). She does have a great following and there are a lot of people who may want it.”

“Hey, if Elvis’ Cadillacs can go for $1 million apiece, who knows?” he said. “Since it is a surplus vehicle, it’s got more intrinsic value to the city in terms of dollars than just some piece of machinery. The bigger dollar we can get, the better. The trick is to replenish the vehicle replacement fund for the city without having to dip into the tax dollars.”

To help potential buyers visualize the vehicle’s former driver, a cardboard cutout of Palin sits behind the wheel in the photo accompanying the ad on eBay and on the city’s website, cityofwasilla.com.

That was just a bit of fun, Rupright said. But trying to get top dollar for the city is not.

Sure $10,000.00 may SEEM like a reasonable price for a vehicle once driven by a woman who has single-handedly pushed the women's movement back 100 years, embarrassed the great state of Alaska, and had the same effect on politics that the black plague had on Europe, but once you pay to have it exorcised by a priest, blessed by a shaman, and dipped in holy water if could REALLY cost you.

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I did not realize it but I have been on the Republican health care plans for years.

Really looking forward to Obamacare.

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Courtesy of Salon:

There’s a large rural component. Although “the spread of far-right groups over the last decade has not been limited to rural areas alone,” writes Osha Gray Davidson, “the social and economic unraveling of rural communities—especially in the midwest—has provided far-right groups with new audiences for their messages of hate. Some of these groups have enjoyed considerable success in their rural campaign.” For many farmers facing foreclosures, the Far Right promises to help them save their land have been appealing, offering farmers various schemes and legal maneuvers to help prevent foreclosures, blaming the farmers’ troubles on Jewish bankers and the one-world government. “As rural communities started to collapse,” Davidson writes, the Far Right “could be seen at farm auctions comforting families . . . confirming what rural people knew to be true: that their livelihoods, their families, their communities—their very lives—were falling apart.” In stark contrast to the government indifference encountered by rural Americans, a range of Far Right groups, most recently the militias, have seemingly provided support, community, and answers.

In that sense, the contemporary militias and other white supremacist groups are following in the footsteps of the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, and other Far Right patriot groups who recruited members in rural America throughout the 1980s. They tap into a long history of racial and ethnic paranoia in rural America, as well as an equally long tradition of collective local action and vigilante justice. There remains a widespread notion that “Jews, African-Americans, and other minority-group members ‘do not entirely belong,’” which may, in part, “be responsible for rural people’s easy acceptance of the far right’s agenda of hate,” writes Matthew Snipp. “The far right didn’t create bigotry in the Midwest; it didn’t need to,” Davidson concludes. “It merely had to tap into the existing undercurrent of prejudice once this had been inflamed by widespread economic failure and social discontent.”

And many have moved from their deindustrializing cities, foreclosed suburban tracts, and wasted farmlands to smaller rural areas because they seek the companionship of like-minded fellows, in relatively remote areas far from large numbers of nonwhites and Jews and where they can organize, train, and build protective fortresses. Many groups have established refuge in rural communities, where they can practice military tactics, stockpile food and weapons, hone their survivalist skills, and become self-sufficient in preparation for Armageddon, the final race war, or whatever cataclysm they envision. Think of it as the twenty-first-century version of postwar suburban “white flight”—but on steroids.

They’re certainly Christian, but not just any Christian—they’re evangelical Protestant, Pentacostalist, and members of radical sects that preach racial purity as the Word of Jesus. (Catholicism is certainly stocked with conservatives on social issues, but white supremacists tap into such a long and ignoble tradition of anti-Catholicism that they tend to have their own right-wing organizations, mostly fighting against women’s rights and gay rights.) Some belong to churches like the Christian Identity Church, which gained a foothold on the Far Right in the early 1980s. Christian Identity’s focus on racism and anti-Semitism provides the theological underpinnings to the shift from a more “traditional agrarian protest” to paramilitarism. It is from the Christian Identity movement that the Far Right gets its theological claims that Adam is the ancestor of the Caucasian race, whereas non-whites are pre-Adamic “mud people,” without souls, and Jews are the children of Satan. According to this doctrine, Jesus was not Jewish and not from the Middle East; actually, he was northern European, his Second Coming is close at hand, and followers can hasten the apocalypse. It is the birthright of Anglo-Saxons to establish God’s kingdom on earth; America’s and Britain’s “birthright is to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations on earth . . . able, by divine right, to dominate and colonize the world.”

This is a chilling article, and one that needs to be read by everyone.

The racism, militarism, and anger create a potent, and most likely combustible, combination that is simply waiting for the spark that will light their fuse.

Combine that with a Right Wing talk radio hosts, Fox News pundits, and other rabble rousers who are constantly throwing lit matches at this powder keg and it is really only a matter of time before somebody gets hurt.

The only question is how many, and will this aggression expand into an actual civil war? Or will calmer heads prevail?

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Whether you support Bashir, and his right to make the comment that he did, or not one at least has to recognize that his apology seems heartfelt.

Of course there are many who have said much worse, and have never offered an apology. (I'm thinking of a certain half term governor whose rhetoric has inspired rampant racism and may have been connected to at least one attempted assassination.

Bashir may have taken his frustration with the Tundra Turd a bit too far, but I think many of us have little difficulty understanding what drove him to those lengths.

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