World News Korner

This is the usual pro-gun, anti-abortion, teabagger that Palin always endorses so no surprise there, except with this endorsement Palin also took the time to slam the other Republican competing against her as well:

We need this fighter and advocate for women and innocent life in Washington!

I admire and respect the good folks supporting other candidates in this race, but we’ll have to disagree on this one. Lizbeth is running against a wealthy self-funded candidate with lots of splashy campaign ads claiming to be a conservative. Since when do conservatives stand for crony capitalism and government bailouts? Please do your homework, voters. Look beyond the fancy anonymous campaign ads. Look at a candidate’s record, not just their rhetoric. Lizbeth is a genuine conservative with a track record to prove it.

The "wealthy self-funded candidate" that Palin refers to is one Curt Clawson who is having some troubles of his own.

Clawson has a few notable endorsements of his own including local Tea Party favorite Byron Donalds and the Tea Party Express itself.

Of course Benacquisto has a number of fairly high profile endorsements of her own, besides Palin, including U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, Tom Rooney and Jason Chaffetz; State Sen. Garrett Richter; Reps. Dane Eagle and Ray Rodrigues and Mayors John Sorey of Naples, Kevin Ruane of Sanibel, Randy Henderson of Fort Myers and Alan Mandel of Fort Myers Beach.

Which kind of makes her the safe bet for Palin, as she has a pretty good shot at the nomination.

Of course this being Florida, and the special election is to find a replacement for a seat formerly held by a Republican (Who as it turned out was arrested for cocaine possession.), if Beacquisto wins the nomination chances are good she will also win the election.

And that even though it appears that she violated Florida election laws a whopping 105 times.

But hey it's a Sarah Palin endorsee, what can you expect?

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Courtesy of Business Insider:

U.S. officials think that Russia may have recently obtained the ability to evade U.S. eavesdropping equipment while commandeering Crimea and amassing troops near Ukraine's border.

The revelation reportedly has the White House "very nervous," especially because it's unclear how the Kremlin hid its plans from the National Security Agency's snooping on digital and electronic communications.

One interesting parallel is the presence of Edward Snowden in Russia, where he has been living since flying to Moscow from Hong Kong on June 23.

In July, primary Snowden source Glenn Greenwald told The Associated Press that Snowden "is in possession of literally thousands of documents that contain very specific blueprints that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."

So it's either a coincidence that the Russians figured out how to evade NSA surveillance while hosting the NSA-trained hacker, or else it implies that Snowden may have provided the Russians with access to NSA files.

A coincidence? Yeah, right.

Of course the claim is that Snowden gave all of his purloined data to the journalists and kept nothing for himself, however the timeline, and veracity, of that occurrence is still in doubt.

There were many who suggested that President Obama's public statement that he will work with Congress to reign in the NSA's ability to collect data as proof that Snowden is a hero and that the country owes him their gratitude.

However we still do not dully understand exactly WHAT Snowden took, and WHOSE hands it ended up in. (Remember before landing in Russia Snowden stopped in Hong Kong for a month, and at that time definitely had the data on him. And we have already possibly seen the fallout from that.)

Personally I find it hard to believe that Putin would offer Snowden sanctuary in Russia if he did not have something substantial with which to bargain. And the ability to evade American eavesdropping equipment, allowing you to invade countries under the radar, would be a rather large bargaining chip.

One of the questions remaining is, if our intelligence gathering technology is now in the hands of the Russians, how vulnerable are we?

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Courtesy of the Testicle Fetishist's Facebook page:

JONI ERNST FOR U.S. SENATE FROM IOWA

If Nebraska’s Deb Fischer can see through the bull in Washington, then Iowa’s Joni Ernst can help her cut through the pork. Growing up on a hog farm in Southwest Iowa, Joni has taken her “pork cutting” skills to the Iowa State Senate where she has been a champion for life, small government, and lower taxes – voting for the largest tax cut in Iowa history. In Washington, she has pledged to defund Obamacare, limit the size of government, and protect life. As a concealed weapon license holder, she will fight to defend our Second Amendment rights – the NRA has given her an “A” rating.

Joni is a veteran of the Iraq war and continues her service as a Lt. Colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard. She’s been a fighter for freedom both in and out of uniform. Iowa – come together and send this Midwest Mama Grizzly roaring to Washington on her Harley so she can join with the good guys to get our country back on track!

-Sarah Palin

To be fair once this woman started talking about cutting off pig balls how could Palin resist?

I mean Ernst has everything that tickles Palin's dust encrusted nether regions. A military connection, a gun fetish, and an unsavory fixation on the male appendage.

I can see Palin and Ernst bonding over Red Bull martini's with a side of meth now. Ernst would discuss in gory detail how she chopped pig nuts off with a rusty meat cleaver and Palin would offer to show her Todd's shriveled up gonads that she carries in her purse.

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Courtesy of Salon:

Every piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent.

If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and “nones” equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. If that gives you reason to celebrate, consider this: by the year 2130, the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Christian will equal a little more than 1 percent. To put that into perspective, today roughly 1 percent of the population is Muslim.

The fastest growing religious faith in the United States is the group collectively labeled “Nones,” who spurn organized religion in favor of non-defined skepticism about faith. About two-thirds of Nones say they are former believers. This is hugely significant. The trend is very much that Americans raised in Christian households are shunning the religion of their parents for any number of reasons: the advancement of human understanding; greater access to information; the scandals of the Catholic Church; and the over-zealousness of the Christian Right.

Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, the authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.”

Ironically, the rise of the Christian Right over the course of the past three decades may well end up being the catalyst for Christianity’s rapid decline. From the moment Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, evangelical Christians, who account for roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population, identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. Michael Spencer, a writer who describes himself as a post-evangelical reform Christian, says, “Evangelicals fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith. Evangelicals will be seen increasingly as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.”

November will mark the tenth anniversary of The Immoral Minority's birth.

On that day I was fired up about a recent election loss to George W. Bush, a criminal war, and the oppressive environment that I felt the Religious Right Wing had created in our country.

All I wanted to do was educate people about the lies that the Bush administration was telling us, provide hope for my liberal friends that we COULD take back the presidency, and make my case that morality is not determined by the church you attend nor the faith you embrace.

In those ten years I have seen amazing changes take place.

The wars are coming to an end, the country is shifting to the Left, and the religious stranglehold is loosening every day.

There is clearly much more work to be done, but damn the progress has been glorious.

My new goal is to stretch my time on earth out long enough to make it to 2062. I would then be 92 years old, so that would be some achievement. (Update: Oops, make that 102. Well that's certainly not better.)

However if I could live until the scales were tipped, and finally those who make decisions based on logic and fact based research outnumbered the superstitious, that would be blissful indeed. On that amazing day I would gladly breathe my last, knowing the future of mankind, and the future of our planet, were in safe hands.

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February 12, 2014

I am writing today to let you know that I am resigning my position as PreK and Kindergarten teacher in the Cambridge Public Schools. It is with deep sadness that I have reached this decision, as I have loved my job, my school community, and the families and amazing and dedicated faculty I have been connected with throughout the district for the past eighteen years. I have always seen myself as a public school teacher, and fully intended to work until retirement in the public school system. Further, I am the product of public schools, and my son attended Cambridge Public Schools from PreK through Grade 12. I am and always have been a firm believer in quality public education.

In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the public schools, I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in the classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment for learning for each of our children. I have experienced, over the past few years, the same mandates that all teachers in the district have experienced. I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them. Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of 1st and 2nd grade, instead of Kindergarten and PreK. I have needed to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, “I can’t do this! Look at me! Know me! Help me! See me!” I have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus for all the demands coming down from above. Each year there are more. Each year I have had less and less time to teach the children I love in the way I know best—and in the way child development experts recommend. I reached the place last year where I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those very children I was there to serve.

I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same: to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom. I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity. I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away. I felt anger rise inside me. I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly. I did not feel I was leaving my job. I felt then and feel now that my job left me.

It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.

Sincerely, Suzi Sluyter

For the reason why this fine, dedicated professional felt the need to walk away from a 25 year career, click here.

The level of training that was asked her, and the constant requirements to test even kindergarten children, essentially drained her to the point that she could no longer do the job that she loved so very much.

This is happening all over the country.

In other words the conservative goal of destroying public education in this country is succeeding.

And we should be ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen.

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As many of you may remember that I wrote about this book back in December:

Yes kids get your coloring book dedicated to a Senator in his first term who is famous for obstructionism, sabotaging government, and lying. You know, just like Abraham Lincoln!

Of course I did not take it very seriously, and who would? However it quickly left my thoughts and I did not spend another second wondering how it was doing or what others thought of it.

And then the other day I happened across a Reddit post that mentioned the reviews it has been receiving. Curious I decided to take a look.

Courtesy of Amazon:

I didn't know how well I'd enjoy this book, seeing as how I only have white crayons. But, as it turns out, that's the only color required! Magnificent!

This book showed up just in time, as my daughter had recently finished her "Connect the Dots Mein Kampf." We spend all day listening to Skrewdriver and breaking the brown crayons.

As a bigot, it's hard for me to find books that advocate for and advance my position. Especially books designed for little kids. Thank God for this book. Now, I can stimulate the creativity of my little children, while still installing in them important lessons. Lessons like guns are good, health care is bad (at least if it comes from a Democrat president), and America is always right. If there are any facts that don't support my positions, I would prefer to ignore them. And if I can't ignore them, then I'd like to be able to shout them down. And I want to teach my children the same lessons. Without books like this one, we are in danger of raising a new generation of open-minded and tolerant adults . . . and it will be impossible to maintain our way of thinking if this happens. I'm looking forward to the next book in this series: "I am not a witch (but if I were, it would totally be okay to cast a spell and turn President Obama into a newt)."

I'm not a fan of his politics, but I have to give Ted Cruz credit for coming up with this coloring book idea. A perfect way to reach the Tea Partiers on their own literary level! The big question remains: Will they stay within the lines?

I could not understand nor stay with in the lines, this book was way over my head, I should stick with Sarah Palins books about green eggs and stuff.

So, after reading many reviews that mentioned what good toilet paper this book made, I was super excited to order my copy. Unfortunately, after receiving mine in the mail I was immediately disappointed. I don't know, perhaps I accidentally received a used copy, but mine was completely worthless for this purpose as every single page was already completely covered with crap...

And here I thought this book would not be well received.

P.S. By the way, good luck in finding a positive, serious, review of the book.

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President Obama in Hague.

Courtesy of Fox Politics:

President Obama is calling on Congress to pass new legislation that would prevent the National Security Agency from collecting and holding vast amounts of data on Americans' phone calls.

The president discussed the plans during a press conference at The Hague in The Netherlands. Previewing his proposal, he claimed it would address concerns about how the bulk data collection could be exploited.

"I'm confident that [the proposal] allows us to do what is necessary in order to deal with the dangers of a terrorist threat but does so in a way that addresses some of the concerns that people have raised," Obama said.

The New York Times first reported late Monday that the administration was expected to propose that Congress overhaul the electronic surveillance program by having phone companies hold onto the call records, according to a government official briefed on the proposal.

The proposal would require that phone companies only keep the records for the 18 months currently required by federal law and allow the government to see certain records when the request is approved by a federal judge. Currently, the government holds onto those phone records for five years so the numbers can be searched for national security purposes.

A senior administration official told Fox News that the president would present "a sound approach to ensuring the government no longer collects or holds this data, but still ensures that the government has access to the information it needs to meet the national security needs his team has identified." The official also said that until the legislation is passed by Congress "the president has directed his administration to renew the current program, as modified substantially by the president in his January speech."

Yeah I know this is Fox but I watched the President say this in his press conference, and of course there is the New York times story, so it is verified.

Of course this is not enough to put every American's fears to rest, but it is certainly a necessary step in the right direction.

Of course leaving it up to Congress to pass legislation on this may be akin to dropping a container of Lego's amidst a pack of wild dogs and asking them to build you a house. And let's ask ourselves, do the Republicans in the House REALLY want to take away some of the NSA's powers?

Hmm, does anybody else smell a potential trap?

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